The vibrant, convivial and unfussy American Realness performance festival, now in its fifth year, is at Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side through January 19. Debuting last night was “13 Love Songs: dot dot dot”, the first evening-length collaboration between friends Ishmael Houston-Jones, a downtown dance pillar in his 60s who still fearlessly puts his body through brutal and manic paces, and Emily Wexler, a big-boned, flame-haired 30-something who matches his self-flagellating bravado.

This work, built around a romantic song cycle ranging from Aretha Franklin’s “I’m in Love” to Ja Rule and Ashanti’s “Always on Time,” reflects the duo’s “mutual belief that the pop song is corrosive,” says the program. And Houston-Jones and Wexler spared themselves no mercies illustrating the self-abusing obsessiveness encoded in the love song. They turned often banally familiar radio tropes such as Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together” and the Gin Blossoms’ “Found Out About You” into smirking invitations to slam their bodies against the floor, beat their breasts and, in a sequence involving knives and raw onions so quasi-unbearable that it evoked awkward laughter, bawl their eyes out.

Finally, they called several audience members onstage, entreating them to fall in love with their own bodies as wholly as we all have with someone else’s. In this dénouement, Houston-Jones pasted mad-crush photos on the wall while uglifying the Stylistics’ silky-smooth “You Are Everything.” Earlier, to Erik Satie, the performers’ own two bodies had come together in a groping, emotionally complicated duet. The piece has a moving back story: while the pair were preparing it, Houston-Jones had a heart attack and Wexler became his caretaker, leading to a new kind of intimacy between the two. Even without knowing that, however, this moment makes it clear that there are forms of love that are far more sophisticated, and even more erotic, than that romantic love that is dutifully packaged for us in pop songs.